Talk:Elbereth
After discussing at Talk:Scroll of mail and at r.g.r.n, I finally sent an email to the devteam. Pat Rankin replied very quickly that in his opinion it is a bug that any item needs to be placed on an E-square to activate it and that this behaviour is a leftover from the times the only way achieve the same effect was a scroll of scare monster lying on the ground. The function that scares monsters only checks squares which have something on them, not empty squares, so they get ignored. --ZeroOne 14:38, 9 September 2006 (UTC)
There is nothing here about the effect of inscribing elbereth with a magic marker. There needs to be. Magic marker elebereths almost appear to be permanent, but I don't have enough information to say for sure. I accessed this website to find out how long MM engravings last. Jack
Please note. When I inscribe elbereth with a MM giant ants do respect it. This page notes that no "A" monsters respect it, and lists giant ants in that category. jack, battling two giant ants with 10hp left
-I think that they only mean monsters represented by a capital A, but the "A" link links to both capital and lowercase. Kahran042
I may have figured out why. I prayed at the sight of my engraving and the ants respected it. Later while being relentlessly pursued through a hallway i engraved it with a MM and they did not respect it. Maybe prayer is the key here Jack
Magic marker Elbereth is equivalent to using a wand of digging or a non-cursed athame - it takes one turn, you never mess up the letters (unless under some bad status effect) and it lasts much longer than engraving in the dust but is not permenant. Prayer has nothing whatsoever to do with it. (A)ngels do not respect E but (a)nts do. EkiM 11:35, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
This whole page is a mess. I intend to rework it later. EkiM 11:40, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
I was so happy to see that this page had been designated the featured article for April, 2008, that I created a jpeg of the word "Elbereth" in three of Tolkien's scripts and added it to the top of the article. That should spiff it up a bit.--Ckbryant 22:24, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
- Thanks, it looks really nice. I think this is a superb article too. --Andronikus 03:37, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
The Speed and Quality section could use further rationalisation. I think this article should focus more on only those details that are relevant to tactical use of Elbereth; I have moved out some of the discussion of slow engraving, and trimmed some of the other discussion a bit, but the section is still rather long in getting over the basic points. --User:cph
Not a goddess
In Tolkien's works Elbereth is not a goddess, but a sort of angelic being. Tolkien's universe has just one god (Iluvatar, who is actually the same as the Christian God). I have changed the article. Molinari 23:14, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
Engraving Probability
As a purely academic point, the probability of engraving Elbereth is slightly higher than (24/25)^8. Consider the following... I was getting swarmed by ants and my mirror wasn't cutting it, I bent down to try to engrave "Elbereth" with my fingers, the ants flee, I look down to read "elBereTh"... Woot! And no, I'm not a big enough nerd to find the actual probability (actually I am but I'd have to know how many characters the game allows you to engrave). DemonDoll 13:02, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
- Since you can engrave 10 letters for free in one turn and be in safe haven that turn already if you succeed, you'd have to account for "ElberethEl" turning out as "23elbereth" or similar. Highly unlikely, yes, but possible. BTW, I'm a mathematician. -Tjr 13:58, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
- And that is why I love this game. I'll have to have a look at the source code sometime...can you "mistakenly" engrave "E" instead of "E" as well? (I mean, does the game exclude the original letter from the possibilities once it determines you've made a typo...er, "engravo"?) I put the calculation in the article, and I am happy to stand corrected. --Ckbryant 15:34, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
- I did the numbers, and the chance of "mis"-engraving E for E etc added up to half a percentage point. Word-boundary cases did not chance the numerical result. -Tjr 12:28, 31 July 2009 (UTC)
I ran a monte-carlo simulation of engraving Elbereth for 8 turns, 100,000 times. I ran it once where you always engrave "Elbereth" and once where you look at what is engraved, then engrave the rest of Elbereth, then the start of the next Elbereth, and Engrave as far as you can get in 9 characters (the limit of instantaneous engraving). I'm not very good with wiki formatting, and I'm not sure how to best display the results. If you're someone who is good at presenting information, please present this strategy in the article. My results:
strategy:naive (engrave "Elbereth")
t:1 t:2 t:3 t:4 t:5 t:6 t:7 t:8
Els:0 => 27908 7825 2144 590 127 36 8 2
Els:1 => 72092 39947 16762 6145 2196 690 210 62
Els:2 => - 52228 43575 24395 11224 4678 1799 636
Els:3 => - - 37519 41740 29249 16367 7977 3501
Els:4 => - - - 27130 37773 31666 20736 11492
Els:5 => - - - - 19431 32593 31751 23943
Els:6 => - - - - - 13970 27466 30760
Els:7 => - - - - - - 10053 22430
Els:8 => - - - - - - - 7174
Els:9 => - - - - - - - -
strategy:clever (engrave 9 characters, such as "rethElber")
t:1 t:2 t:3 t:4 t:5 t:6 t:7 t:8
Els:0 => 28128 7017 1548 299 63 7 2 -
Els:1 => 71872 39120 14182 4117 963 210 47 9
Els:2 => - 53863 42498 19770 7011 2069 532 128
Els:3 => - - 41772 42492 23639 9718 3285 950
Els:4 => - - - 33322 41037 26587 12429 4239
Els:5 => - - - - 27287 38686 28410 13056
Els:6 => - - - - - 22723 36127 25850
Els:7 => - - - - - - 19168 30697
Els:8 => - - - - - - - 20073
Els:9 => - - - - - - - 4998
Thefifthsetpin 00:54, September 14, 2009 (UTC)
- If the difference doesn't look substantial to you, notice that by turn 3 your chance of failing to engrave an E drops by about a quarter. By turn 4 it drops by half. I posit that 3-4 failed attempts to engrave an E have killed many adventurers.Thefifthsetpin 00:54, September 14, 2009 (UTC)
- My numbers are optimistic -- I assume you don't rub out what you're standing on while you engrave on the next turn. Nethack isn't so nice. If anyone posts the odds for that part, I'd be happy to include that in my simulation.)Thefifthsetpin 00:54, September 14, 2009 (UTC)
How to paste
Somebody asked this with an "inline question". Just so it doesn't get lost: You paste into Nethack with the usual means of your operating system. For example, in OS X, you paste using apple-v into the popup opened by the tiles port, or using apple-v into the terminal window you telnetted to NAO with. Tjr 13:45, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
